For my presentation in a Critical Thinking/Reading class I have selected a presentation on Violent Media, focusing on gaming. Clearly I’m on our side, I have someone else doing the con side. But I would like your opinions on games to present how our culture feels about this.

If you don’t mind me getting philosophical for a moment here… a man is not made up of a series of isolated incidents. Whenever someone commits an act, no matter how evil that act may be, there will always be multiple causes. Every little thing we do in our lives is dependent on a multitude of factors, many of which are out of our control.

To isolate one thing, whether that be violence in the media or even an aspect of that person’s personality, diminishes everything that makes us reasoning, questioning beings. The only true enemy of mankind is ignorance.

Humor me for one second. Let’s say someone blamed violent video games for causing them to hurt someone. It’s a defense that has been used several times, unfortunately. Here’s some questions we SHOULD be asking.

Was this person born mentally deficient or with some sort of mental illness? If so, was it ever detected? If it wasn’t, why not? Did he exhibit any warnings signs? What were they and why weren’t they picked up on? If it was detected, was he ever prescribed medicinal or emotional treatment? How intense? If he wasn’t given medicine or therapy, why not? Who made that decision and how qualified were they? If he stopped taking his medicine or going to therapy before committing this act, why did he do so?

And that’s only his mental state WITHOUT outside influences. How involved were his parents in his day-to-day life? Was he bullied at school? Did he have anyone to confide in, to share his problems with in a non-violent way?

In a broader sense, humor me again: what leads a man to commit a violent act in general? What preventative measures could and more than likely should have been taken in order to turn someone from a person capable of violence into a person that can make their arguments through calm, rational thought and, if all else fails, leave a situation before one or both or any number of people involved believe that violence is the only answer?

In looking to find a reason why someone commits a violent act, we must first ask ourselves: what is violence? What causes it, what allows it to fester, what situations existed that led down this road and what situations could have existed that would have helped things turn out differently?

Do we really have to consider every single possibility? I believe we do. If we truly want to find the exact set of reasons that led to an act of violence in order to prevent the same situation or any number of other situations from happening in the future… if we truly cared, we should spare no expense.

But no one wants to admit that, because no one wants to open that can of worms. Nobody wants to take hours, days, weeks debating the nature of good and evil and fully examining a person’s life and the choices he made and the choices others made to influence him to truly find out what caused this person to act out violently.

Much easier to just blame something, my friend. Anything, everything. Blame video games, stick your head back in the sand, go back to sleep and be done with it.

well i think the important thing is that unbiased research has never proven any link between gaming and violence, and in all cases of a well known incident of violence, post-event investigation has found that the persons were usually pre-disposed to violence due to mental health issues or social conditions. Gaming was often just a means of escapism but was not seen as the triggering factor.

there has been plenty of biased unscientific research published by pressure groups, but this is no different from previous ‘youth demons’ which were attacked by similar groups including rock music, drugs and drink.

i think it is important to highlight in your paper that gaming is not the first demon to be accused of corrupting our youth. in fact it goes right back to Socrates who is now a hero of western civilisation:

From that article the interesting line to me is “Socrates comes to find that Meletus is full of self contradictions and generalizations.” – which is often the case of those accusing gaming of corrupting our youth. They talk in generalised unproven ways. And the recent speech by the NRA guy said ‘the only thing which stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun’. that is an obvious contradiction because he basically just outlined the entire plot of Call of Duty, despite earlier claiming that games like CoD are a corrupting influence.

if you locate a report from a proper government appointed study paneled by medical professionals you will usually find an admission that no evidence can be found of a link between gaming and violence.

as for parental responsibilities, i agree that bad parenting is often a factor in a child becoming isolated through lack of engagement. however with technology i think that parents could benefit from help in understanding what their children could be using the equipment to access or play. pre-installation of parental controls on consumer PC’s which the adult can choose to uninstall sounds like a good step to me for example, just as AV software used to be left to the consumer to install but now usually comes pre-installed.

As commented by others, there has been no evidence that videogames and videogames that shows violence have any influence over the people that actually commit violent acts.

One of the most interesting aspects of people is how we are so determined to find who or what is “responsible” for all the things that go wrong. It seems to be easier to thing that there has to be this one, important thing, and that if we could only just fix that, then everything would be just fine. Unfortunately, in all things human in general, and in violence in particular, there’s never one single thing that tips the scale, is a hundred little things. Put two people in very similar enviroments and they will react differently, it is something that is very, very hard to predict, is not as sraightforwards as you might think by watching Criminal Minds or something loike that.

Do people who commit violent acts play violent videogames? Yes, they do… just as they watch TV, or drink milk, or watch Youtube; yet you don’t hear anyone claiming that any of those things causes violent behaviour. It’s just easier to go for a simple solution.